


I moved further than I thought I could (But I missed you more than I thought I would)

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Fix-It, Getting Together, Here be spoilers, M/M, Minor Junior Reigns/Tani Rey, Phone Calls & Telephones, Steve is a little dumb but we love him, h50 episode 10.22, the entire team is in this but they each only get a few lines max
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:53:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23521867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: Danny hits send on the text, drops the phone in his lap and leans back, closing his eyes. He has a vague thought that maybe the dying sunlight will at least stay long enough to warm him up before it inevitably leaves him too, but before he gets to find out, his lap starts ringing. When he looks down, there’s Steve’s static face grinning up at him from the screen.Slightly disturbing.Or: Steve responds to Danny’s text in more than one way.
Relationships: Five-0 Team & Danny "Danno" Williams, Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 56
Kudos: 561





	I moved further than I thought I could (But I missed you more than I thought I would)

**Author's Note:**

> The thing happened! The thing! The finale thing! They aired it!
> 
> And I had a lot of thoughts and feelings about it that I still haven’t entirely worked through, but you can find them vomited all over Tumblr. Recap of the relevant bit of the episode for this fic: at the end, Steve leaves Danny behind on the beach by the McGarrett house and gets on a plane to an (as far as I know?) undisclosed location. He’s just sat down when he receives a text from Danny reading _I miss you already_ (which he smiles about a bit but doesn’t respond to), and I think that’s all you need to know to understand what happens here.
> 
> The title is from Amber Run’s _I found_ and in the past I always thought I’d end up using it for a very angsty fic some day (the song would certainly imply that), but then this fic happened and I could not resist. *

Danny hits send on the text, drops the phone in his lap and leans back, closing his eyes. He has a vague thought that maybe the dying sunlight will at least stay long enough to warm him up before it inevitably leaves him too, but before he gets to find out, his lap starts ringing. When he looks down, there’s Steve’s static face grinning up at him from the screen.

Slightly disturbing.

He picks up before he can debate maybe letting Steve hang for just a second, just out of spite. “Yeah?”

What follows is a moment of not quite silence. There is someone on the other end of the line, but they sigh a little and then they’re just breathing, and Danny doesn’t have a hard time imagining Steve’s face as he presumably grapples with the fact that he’s feeling an emotion. Nobody gets to escape their messy clutches these days, least of all Steve.

When words do eventually get produced, they’re not revolutionary, but a pretty nice opener regardless. “I miss you too.” It’s plain, with a faint undertone of _duh, you should know this_ , but no less honest for it.

“Good.” Danny is feeling a tidbit vindictive about sitting on this beach on his own – sue him. He swallows hard to make sure the closing of his throat doesn’t sound through in his voice. “Where are you? Still deciding on a destination?”

“Already on the plane. It’s still boarding.”

Danny feels a pang at how fast things move when you want nothing more but for them to stand still for just a second longer. He’s already been given more information than he thought he’d get anytime soon, but he’s a greedy man. “Where are you headed?”

“Toronto,” Steve says, who is apparently feeling generous. Either that, or he really does miss Danny and _wants_ to be made fun of.

“Toronto? As in Toronto, Canada?”

“You know another Toronto?”

On a map of the world, Toronto is awfully close to New Jersey. Danny pushes that thought away so he won’t push Steve, too, and chooses something else to harp on. “What the hell are you going to do in Canada?”

“I don’t know,” Steve says, which sounds about right. “Climb a mountain?”

“Climb a _mountain_ ,” Danny repeats, again, because Steve needs to hear all these words he’s saying from someone else’s mouth. Danny is under no illusion that they’ll sound as dumb to Steve as they do to him, but he’s never given up hope for a modicum of common sense, so he won’t start now. “In _Canada_. Because it’s not like Hawaii is just a little group of underwater mountains that happened to grow big enough they weren’t underwater anymore, so there’s no way you could have done that right here.”

“A colder mountain.” Steve sounds frustrated. Danny can relate. He gives Steve a short moment to reflect and maybe come up with a better reply, but he doesn’t. Instead, Steve still sounds frustrated when he says, “Danny, I made a mistake.”

“A mistake?”

“Yes, a mistake. Are you just going to parrot everything I say back at me, or what is this?”

Danny’s anxiety, lurking like a blurry too-sharp brightness around the edges of everything these past few weeks, flares up big time. “What kind of mistake? Are you alright?”

“I’m fine, I just- Why am I going to Canada?”

Confusing. Steve is the most confusing man Danny’s ever met. “That’s what I keep asking you,” he reminds him. Maybe Steve’s having some kind of mental break and that’s why he’s forgetting his own plans. It would be very like him to wait until he’s just out of Danny’s reach before he has a crisis. Why do things the easy way if you can make them unnecessarily hard instead?

“Yeah, I know, but I mean-” Steve breaks off very suddenly. Danny wishes they were videocalling, and that desire only gets stronger when there’s some undefinable background noise and Steve says, urgently, “God, I have to get off this plane.”

Danny tries not to freak. He succeeds somewhat, in the sense that he doesn’t hang up on Steve to call HPD and order them to direct every unit they can spare and a few they can’t to the airport post haste. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” There’s a huff. It doesn’t _sound_ like Steve’s plane is being hijacked, but you never know. He hasn’t always had normal people responses to threats of violence in the past. “I just don’t even like Canada. What’s in Canada?”

Danny’s sitting in a chair. He’s sitting in a solid chair on a quiet beach in a place he knows better than the inside of his own pants pocket, but his mind feels a little spinny and overwhelmed anyway. “Mountains,” he reminds Steve, nonsensically. “Maple syrup. Couple of moose.”

“I can buy maple syrup at the corner store.” That’s true, because the corner store has very nice maple syrup, but Danny is even more in agreement when Steve makes his next point. “I don’t need to go to Canada for it. Hold on, give me a sec.”

“For what?” Danny asks, but the only answer he gets is Steve’s voice muffled to the point of incomprehensibility, like he’s talking to someone else and has his hand over the phone. “Hey,” Danny says, “you know you can just silence your microphone, right? I know you know how to. I’ve seen you do it to perps at the tech table a bunch of times, and that’s a way more complicated system than the average Android.” 

On the other end of the line, Steve is still giving an indistinct speech, which means Danny is talking to no one except very literally Steve’s hand, so he stops doing that.

Without Steve saying things to distract him, Danny is suddenly thrown back into awareness of his own physical surroundings. His hand on the phone is sweaty and a little cramped, so he switches to his other ear. He kicks off his flip-flops and digs his toes into the sand. It’s grounding. This grainy stuff that he’s going to spread through the entire house whether he wants to or not, it’s a sign of home.

It takes a long moment, but eventually, Steve’s voice comes through loud and clear again. “Danny,” he says, like he needs to ask for Danny’s attention while they’re on a private phone call with just the two of them, or maybe like he just likes saying it. “Danny, you still there? They won’t let me go.”

That’s alarming, once again. “What? Who are _they_? How can they-”

“We’re taxiing and the plane is about to take off. I tried to pull the Five-0 card, but I don’t have a badge with me to back it up.”

It’s the first time Danny really, fully lets himself believe in his slowly developed theory of what Steve is trying to do. Steve is doing his best to get _off_ the plane, to come _back_ , to _not leave_. Danny’s heart races for no good reason at all. “You picked the worst possible moment to try retirement, you know that? Tell them you have the Governor on speed dial.”

“I don’t think the Governor would enjoy that,” Steve says. He sounds like he thinks it’s a kind of amusing but obviously fruitless suggestion, but he can’t fool Danny into thinking he hasn’t already seriously considered it himself. 

“Come on, she owes you a favor or twenty.”

A metallic clicking noise in the background – maybe Steve is sitting back down and buckling up. “Yeah, but I still can’t ask her to stop a commercial plane I’m on just because I had a romantic epiphany.”

Danny forgets the cajoling and kidding very quick. “You had a what now?”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Steve says, which, no, what, no. “The stewardess is about to resort to violence.”

“Flight attendant,” Danny corrects, and then mentally yells at himself for it. Sometimes his mouth just does these things while his brain is in an entirely different place. Needling Steve is like second nature, a habit worn so deep into his soul it’s pure instinct; trying to figure out if Steve means what Danny _thinks_ he means by using those weird words in this equally weird context, on the other hand, is a distinctly new, far trickier premise.

Steve is very obviously not privy to Danny’s brain hammering on the exclamation point key, because he just keeps going. “Danny, I love you, alright? Talk to you in a bit.”

“Love you too.” Another one of those instincts. Then, finally- “But seriously, romantic epiphany?”

Steve laughs. He _laughs_. It’s a little insulting and deeply, almost painfully good to hear. “Hey, you can’t be _that_ surprised. You moved in with me months ago. I think it’s safe to say you made the first- Bye!” The last word is hurried and fainter, like Steve is moving away from the microphone.

Or, of course, like the microphone is moving away from him. “Excuse me,” a female voice says, polite but definitely strained. Danny suddenly feels like this is one of the best days of his life. Steve just broke through the last barriers in their relationship and then instantly had his phone confiscated by a flight attendant, like a little kid who gets punished by the teacher. A very snippy teacher, at that. “We’re preparing for takeoff. All phones should be switched off or in airplane mode, which means I will have to put an end to this conversation.”

“Sure,” Danny tells her, doing his best not to make it too obvious he’s having a hard time containing his own laughter now. “Sorry about my partner.”

The flight attendant is kinder than could be expected. Maybe she’s Canadian. “You can talk to him again when we land,” she says, “which should be in about twelve hours.”

Danny nods. She can’t see him, but it feels like something he needs to do. “Thanks. Hey, tell him he’s an idiot and that it came from me, would you? And that I love him.”

A beat. “I’ll consider it,” she says, which is a very polite way to say she almost definitely won’t do it. Fair enough.

The call is put to an end from the other side, which leaves Danny right back where he started five or ten minutes ago, except not at all. He would probably still look just as lonely, but he doesn’t feel that way. Steve is coming right back. Steve wants them to _talk_ , in a way that sounded more like it might involve sentences like _hey, wanna add making out to the list of things we do because we love each other?_ rather than _I think I need a break_. He’s already said those last words and now he’s breaking off his break to come say others, so Danny feels pretty confident he’s reading things right.

He spends another few minutes or so attempting to truly comprehend what just happened, and then he decides he’s done enough comprehending and starts on the far easier task of heaving his injured body up out of the chair and using his cane to hobble painfully across the sand, the lawn and the lanai. 

When he enters the living room, he finds the entirety of Five-0 taking up every available seat, with an atmosphere in the room like someone died. More than one pair of eyes is visibly red-rimmed. 

“Hi,” he tells all of them, and makes a slow beeline around Tani sitting cross-legged on the floor cuddling Eddie half in her lap. He enters the kitchen and it’s eerily silent in the living room the entire time until he comes back, carrying a glass of water. Junior jumps from sitting on the actual couch to a perch on one of the armrests while Quinn and Noelani push closer together on the other end, creating enough space for at least two Dannys to fit. 

He takes the spot they’re offering wordlessly and leans his cane against Junior’s knee on purpose.

It takes until he’s settled and sipping his water for someone to actually speak up, instead of just watch him with kind, worried eyes. “How’re you doing with all this, man?” Lou asks.

They probably don’t want to hear he feels a little giddy, which is just as well, because he doesn’t want to tell them. He could play them for a bit – it would be so damn easy – but he knows they’re all heartbroken and trying to offer him comfort by tiptoeing around him, and he’s not cruel. “Steve’s coming back,” he informs them.

“Of course he is,” Adam says. His tone is soothing. “He’ll always be back at some point.”

“No, I mean, he’s _coming back_.” Danny leans his half-empty glass on his knee, looks at it, and decides it’s probably actually half full. It’s a day full of epiphanies left and right. “He called me. His plane to Toronto took off just now, but he’s getting the first flight back when he arrives, so he’ll be here again in around two times the flight time from Honolulu to Canada plus however long the layover takes. Best guess, he’ll be home for dinner tomorrow.”

“Oh,” Lou says. He sounds almost a little disappointed. There is some palpable confusion, but nobody in the entire room, Danny notes, seems particularly surprised at this turn of events.

Tani has paused her massage of Eddie’s ear, but she picks it up again when Eddie nudges his nose against her leg. “Well, I definitely feel a little awkward about that teary goodbye now.”

“Guess we’ll be throwing him a welcome back dinner tomorrow,” Quinn says. She shares a grin with Noelani.

“Kamekona’s,” Danny decides. He feels entitled to make that decision. No need for anything fancy, and Kamekona will want to take his turn shedding a big, happy tear over Steve showing his face again so soon. “Steve can pay. He was barely even gone.”

“Sounds good to me.” Lou gets up out of the lazy chair, groaning a little. “Tell him about it when he calls you again after he touches down in Toronto. Actually, hold on, do we know why Toronto?”

Danny gives it a dramatic pause for effect. “He wanted to climb a mountain.”

Lou allows that to sink in for a moment, but then seems to decide not to bother with it. He shakes his head. “See you all tomorrow,” he says, which is the unofficial starting shot for the great Five-0 migration out of the McGarrett living room. When Adam pulls the front door shut behind him, only Danny and Junior are left on the couch, and Tani and Eddie on the floor. Looking at the two of them, Danny genuinely isn’t sure if Tani is lingering for her bae or the dog.

“He’s really coming back already?” the bae asks.

“Guess he missed me too much.” Danny makes sure to stay cool and a little aloof about it, like this isn’t the biggest relief he’s felt since any of the outcomes in his favor in custody battles with Rachel. Funny how he never wanted to come to this sun-drenched rock in the Pacific in the first place, but ever since, all of his biggest nightmares have revolved around people leaving it.

Of course, he can front as much as he wants, but Junior and Tani have pretty sharp eyes, and Tani’s tongue leans that way, too. “You know things don’t count as a guess if you know them for sure, right?” she asks.

He gives a vague hummed noise in reply, but she probably picks up on how he’s smiling when he empties his glass.

*

When the phone rings again, it’s four in the middle of the night, but Danny answers on the second ring because he fell asleep curled up in the middle of Steve’s mattress with his phone in hand. “So I bought a ticket home,” are Steve’s first words, “but you should know it’s very awkward to have a flight attendant tell you in the middle of a crowded plane that you’re an idiot but your boyfriend loves you anyway.”

Danny has to turn his face into Steve’s pillow to hide from the world, he’s grinning so stupidly hard.

**Author's Note:**

> * I MOVED FURTHER THAN I THOUGHT I COULD, because he only moved to the airport and that was already too far, but then he was taken to Canada against his will. GET IT. I’ll stop explaining my own joke now, thank you for your time. 
> 
> And thank you for reading! I hope you’re all slowly inching back towards okay after the emotional tumult of last Friday’s episode. ❤
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


End file.
